The digital collections platform provides access to the Ransom Center’s collections for students, scholars and members of the public who are unable to visit the Center. It also provides a way for visitors to access fragile materials or collections that exist in challenging formats, such as personal effects and costumes. One example is a collection of glass plate negatives that documents theater performances in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The fragile collection was previously inaccessible, but the negative plates were digitized and converted to positive images for the digital collection.

Visitors to the Ransom Center’s website can search within collections or across collections, often revealing related materials. Additional tools provide users with the ability to virtually flip through books, enlarge images and compare page images with accompanying transcripts, which are text-searchable.

Collections are being added on an ongoing basis, and planned digitization projects include the photographs of nineteenth-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and photographs and ephemera from the Fred Fehl dance collection.

This project was made possible with funding from the Booth Heritage Foundation.

Posing for the Rev. Charles L. Dodgson (1832–1898) for over a dozen years, Alexandra “Xie” Kitchin (1864–1925) grows up before our eyes through the series of portraits made of her during the 1860s and 1870s. Named after Princess (later Queen) Alexandra, who was a close friend of her mother, Xie (pronounced “Ecksy”) was the daughter of a clerical colleague of Dodgson’s at Christ Church College in Oxford. She began sitting for Dodgson’s tableaux at the early age of four, and, by at least one historian’s count, sat for him more than 50 times before she turned 16. Several other children—or “child-friends”—that Dodgson photographed were quickly bored with dressing up and sitting for long poses before the camera, but Xie participated well into her teens and is frequently referenced in the photographer’s diaries.

Dodgson’s first, or “seated,” portrait of the costumed Xie is directly influenced by one of the greatest child portraits of the Georgian Era, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting of Penelope Boothby (1785–1791). Penelope, the only child and heir of Sir Brooke Boothby, the seventh baronet, and his wife, Susanna, was painted at the age of three in Reynolds’s London studio in July 1788. By all accounts, Reynolds enjoyed the company of small children as much as Dodgson and had a fine relationship with the young Penelope throughout their sessions. Art historians attribute the endearing quality of the painting to their brief but strong personal bond.

Another factor contributing to the painting’s fame was the tragic fate of its sitter. Young Penelope would spend the remainder of her short life at the family estate at Ashbourne Hall in Derbyshire. She died apparently of encephalitis in 1791, a month before her sixth birthday. Her death led to the tragic collapse of her parents’ marriage. After the final breakup of the family estate, this most successful of Reynolds’s child portraits eventually found its way to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where Dodgson undoubtedly fell under its spell a half century later.

Dodgson posed a costumed but clearly older Xie in a position similar to the Reynolds painting. He also had her stand in costume for a second pose. For the final image from the series, he brought into his studio a wicker chaise and an Oriental parasol, had Xie remove her oversized “Mob-Cap” bonnet, and placed her in semi-recline in the chaise. The resulting tableau, an original Dodgson composition combined with Xie’s own studied gaze, would become one of the great child portraits of the Victorian Era.

Dodgson, who gained early fame in mathematics and literature under the pen name of Lewis Carroll, remained an avid photographer for 25 years until abandoning the art in 1880. He retired from teaching the following year but stayed in Oxford, writing about mathematics until his death in 1898. Xie Kitchin published no memoirs or reminiscences of her friendship with Dodgson, but she would go on to marry and live in London until her death in 1925. Interestingly, the first of her six children was named Penelope.

By Alicia Dietrich

To complement The University of Texas at Austin’s new James Turrell piece The Color Inside opening on campus this week, a selection of books and artworks associated with Turrell are on view at the Harry Ransom Center in the third-floor Director’s Gallery. Several events are planned around campus today and tomorrow to celebrate the opening of the new Skyspace on the roof of the Student Activity Center.

Today at noon

Conversation with James Turrell

Friday, October 18, 12-1pm

Student Activity Center Ballroom

Artist James Turrell and Lynn Herbert, former senior curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, discuss The Color Inside, a Skyspace on the rooftop garden of the Student Activity Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Free and no reservations required; limited seating available.

Saturday, October 19, 2 p.m. and 3 p.m.

Tours of The Color Inside, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Harry Ransom Center

Various locations on campus

The tour begins on the rooftop of the Student Activity Center with a music performance by a string quartet from the Butler School of Music inside the Skyspace. The tour will walk to the Blanton to view a large-scale aquatint by Turrell entitled First Light, Plate B1, which is on display through mid-December. The tour concludes at the Ransom Center with James Turrell: Deep Sky, an exhibition of seven aquatints created by Turrell in collaboration with the publisher Peter Blum Editions, on display through December 13. The tour will last between 60 and 90 minutes.

Saturday, October 19, 2 p.m., 3 p.m., and 4 p.m.

Music Performance

Inside the Skyspace, rooftop of the Student Activity Center

On opening day, Landmarks presents three unique performances of Lightscape, a new composition by University of Texas graduate student, assistant instructor, and award-winning composer Joel Love. Landmarks commissioned Love to create a composition inspired by The Color Inside. Lightscape will be performed by Butler School of Music students Yunji Lee, Chloe Park, Andrew Haduong, and Mic Vredenburgh. It will also stream live online.

By Abigail Cain

Although Anna Atkins and Anna Krachey share a first name, Krachey acknowledges a much deeper connection. A member of Austin-based artist collective Lakes Were Rivers, Krachey came across Atkins’s work in the Ransom Center’s collections. She noticed an exploration of light, layering, and space that was similar to her own photographic practice.

Such connections form the basis of the Ransom Center’s current exhibition, Contemporary Photographic Practice and the Archive. Created in collaboration with Lakes Were Rivers, the exhibition highlights members’ works that were influenced in some way by the Ransom Center. Approximately 50 new works are displayed alongside Ransom Center collection materials chosen by the artists. The pairings illustrate how archives and cultural collections stimulate new ideas and creative acts.

Atkins, born in 1799 in England, was an amateur botanist. She is known primarily for her thousands of cyanotypes, which often featured marine botanicals and other plants and objects. Peacock Feathers offers an example of the camera-less photographic technique—one that provided a new way of recording scientific specimens, different from the traditional letterpress method.

Krachey recognizes a similarity between Atkins’s choice of subject and her own process of identifying and selecting objects for photographs. She aims to reveal the unfamiliar in everyday objects by creating tension between the natural and the artificial. In her work Filament (2012), she plays with tactility, translucency, and composition, using analog rather than digital photographic methods to manipulate objects and create illusionistic space.

Both Filament and Peacock Feathers are on display through August 4. On this Thursday, July 18, the artists of Lakes Were Rivers will discuss their work at 7 p.m. in the galleries.

By Jennifer Tisdale

James H. 'Jimmy' Hare crossing the Piave river, 1918, lantern slide; Gordon Conway, 'Red Cross Girl' illustration for Vanity Fair, 1918; Bob Landry, film still from 'A Farewell to Arms,' 1957; Erich Maria Remarque, 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' 1930; Lucile Patterson, National League for Woman's Service World War I military recruiting poster.

The fellowships support research projects in the humanities that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s collections of manuscripts, rare books, film, photography, art, and performing arts materials.

The fellowship recipients, half of whom will be coming from abroad, will use Ransom Center materials to support projects with such titles as “Postirony: Countercultural Fictions from Hipster to Coolhunter,” “Elliott Erwitt: Early Work,” “Obsession: The Films of Brian De Palma,” “David Foster Wallace: The Form of His Fiction,” “Matisse’s Illustrations for Ulysses,” and “Doris Lessing’s Intuitive Style.”

“Support of scholarly research is one of the primary goals of the Ransom Center,” said Director Thomas F. Staley. “With what has become one of the largest fellowship programs of its kind, we encourage scholars from around the world to make new discoveries about the writers and artists who have shaped our culture.”

The fellowships range from one to three months in duration and provide $3,000 of support per month. Travel stipends and dissertation fellowships are also awarded.

The stipends are funded by individual donors and organizations, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hobby Family Foundation, the Dorot Foundation, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and The University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies.

By Alicia Dietrich

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940), one of the Ransom Center’s most famous and frequently borrowed works of art, is on display through July 28.

Since 1990 the painting has been on almost continuous loan, featured in exhibitions in more than 25 museums in the United States and around the world in countries such as Australia, Canada, France, and Spain. View a map of where the painting has traveled in recent years.

The painting was most recently on view in the three-venue exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Activities of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and exhibited subsequently at the Musée National des beaux-arts du Quebec in Quebec City and at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. The painting travels next to The ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj, Denmark, for the exhibition Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera, running from September 7, 2013 to January 5, 2014.

Kahlo (1907–1954) taught herself to paint after she was severely injured in a bus accident at the age of 18. For Kahlo, painting became an act of cathartic ritual, and her symbolic images portray a cycle of pain, death, and rebirth.

Kahlo’s affair in New York City with Hungarian-born photographer Nickolas Muray (1892–1965), which ended in 1939, and her divorce from artist Diego Rivera at the end of that same year left her heartbroken and lonely. But she produced some of her most powerful and compelling paintings and self-portraits during this time.

Muray purchased the self-portrait from Kahlo to help her during a difficult financial period. It is part of the Ransom Center’s Nickolas Muray collection of more than 100 works of modern Mexican art, which was acquired by the Center in 1966. The collection also includes Kahlo’s Still Life with Parrot and Fruit (1951) and the drawing Diego y Yo (1930).

View the video documentary “A World of Interest: Frida Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird,” which highlights the painting’s return to the Ransom Center.

By Megan Dirickson

The Ransom Center is currently engaged in a one-year, grant-funded project to digitize, catalog, process and make the Frank Reaugh art collection available online, which will be the first complete collection of the Ransom Center’s new digital asset management system. The project is ongoing and is expected to be completed and available online to viewers by the fall.

The Frank Reaugh collection consists primarily of pastel landscapes on paper and board but also includes oil landscapes and portraits, charcoal sketches, and pen and ink drawings. Reaugh’s (1883–1937) favorite subject, the Texas Longhorn, is often featured within his untamed Texas landscapes. His work includes native subjects and locations ranging from the Texas Panhandle to the state’s western plains and mountainous regions and beyond the state border to New Mexico, Arizona, and Wyoming. Interest in Frank Reaugh has grown steadily over the years, as his contributions as an influential artist, arts educator, benefactor, naturalist, and inventor are being increasingly recognized by curators, collectors, and scholars. Access to the works has long been limited due to their delicate nature and to their sheer number and size.

Digitization of the framed and often fragile works is not simple. Many of the pastels have never before been removed from their original frames and mats, which were largely constructed by Reaugh himself. Thus far, the first half of the collection has been digitized, beginning with Reaugh’s distinctive small-format pastel landscapes. When the project is finished, researchers will not only have unprecedented access to the entire body of Reaugh’s work held by the Ransom Center but will also have the opportunity to peer beneath the frames.

During the process of removing these delicate pastels from their frames, there is often an unexpected surprise waiting beneath the window mat. Reaugh used his own technique to prepare the paper to hold the pastel media, and evidence of this applied fixative is easily visible in the margins of the paper support. A view of the margins of some of these pastels also reveals previously hidden inscriptions and areas where Reaugh tested his colors. One can see the well-delineated borders of his rectangular landscapes, which he sometimes stayed within, but more often allowed his strokes to extend beyond the intended space. Two pastels have even revealed outlined sketches on the reverse, offering insight into Reaugh’s preliminary drawing techniques. In addition to the works themselves, the framing materials and methods speak to Reaugh’s time on the cattle-trail, where it appears that he made use of whatever materials he had on hand.

Images of each artwork (including the fronts and backs, framed and unframed) will be available via the Ransom Center’s new digital asset management system in the fall. Funding for the Frank Reaugh project is made possible with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.